The Cold, Cold Ground

couldn’t light a fire in the upstairs or downstairs grates. I’d reckoned I wouldn’t have to worry about this until November but now I was obviously going to have to get someone in to see about it.
    I lay there thinking and the Chief’s question came back to me.
    Why had I joined the police?
    And for the second time in twenty-four hours I thought about the incident .
    Don’t look for it in my shrink reports. And don’t ask any of my old girlfriends.
    Never talked about it with anyone.
    Not me ma. Not me da. Not even a priest. Unusual for a blabber like yours truly.
    It was 2 May 1974. I was two years into my PhD programme. A nice spring day. I was walking past the Rose and Crown Bar on the Ormeau Road just twenty yards from my college digs.
    It was the worst year of the Troubles but I hadn’t personally been affected. Not yet. I was still neutral. Trying to keep aloof. Trying to do my own thing. The closest I’d come to assuming a position was after Bloody Sunday when me and Dad had attended the funerals in Derry and I’d thought for twenty-four hours about joining the IRA.
    Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?
    2 May 1974.
    The Rose and Crown was a student joint. I’d been in there for a bevy maybe three hundred times in my years at Queens. It was my local. I knew all the regulars. Normally I would have been at that bar at that time but as it happened I’d been meeting a girl at the Students’ Union and I’d had enough to drink already.
    It was a no-warning bomb. The UVF (the Ulster Volunteer Force, an illegal Protestant paramilitary group) claimed responsibility. Later the UDA (the Ulster Defence Association, another Protestant paramilitary group) said they did it. Still later the UVF said it had been an IRA bomb that had exploded prematurely.
    I didn’t care about any of that.
    The alphabet soup didn’t interest me.
    I wasn’t badly hurt. A burst eardrum, abrasions, cuts from fragmenting glass.
    Nah, I was ok, but inside the bar was carnage.
    A slaughterhouse.
    I was the first person through the wreck of the front door.
    And that was the moment—
    That was the moment when I knew that I wanted to be some small part of ending this madness. It was either get out or do something. I chose the latter.
    The police were keen to have me. A university graduate, a psychologist, and that most precious thing of all … a Catholic.
    And now seven years later, after a border posting, the CID course, a child kidnapping, a high-profile heroin bust, and several murder investigations, I was a newly promoted Detective Sergeant at the relatively safe RUC station in Carrickfergus. I knew why they’d sent me here. I was here to stay out of harm’s way and I was here to learn …
    I sat up in bed and turned on the radio and got the news about the Pope.
    Still alive, the tough old bugger. I genuflected and muttered a brief, embarrassed prayer of thanks.
    “Why is it so bloody cold!” I said and bundled up the duvet and pillow and carried them to the landing.
    I knelt down in front of the paraffin heater.
    From the Arctic to the tropics.
    I assumed the foetal position on the pine floor. I immediately fell asleep.
    Rain.
    Such rain. Lugh draws the sun and sea and turns them into rain .
    I stirred from a dream of water.
    Light.
    Heat.
    My body floating on the paraffin fumes above the river and the sea.
    Next door children’s laughter and then something heavy smashing against the wall. They were always going at it, the Bridewell boys.
    I opened my eyes. My throat was dry. The landing was blue because of the indigo flame of the paraffin heater. The heater had been a gift from my parents when I first moved to Belfast and I had lugged it to Armagh, Tyrone and lastly to Carrickfergus. Even now the gorgeous, heady kerosene aroma time-travelled me across the decades to my childhood in Cushendun.
    For five minutes I lay there listening to the rain pouring off the roof and then, reluctantly, I went downstairs.
    I made tea and toast with butter and marmalade. I showered, dressed in a sober black polo-neck sweater, black jeans, black shoes. I put on a dark sports jacket and my raincoat. I put the revolver in my coat pocket and left the ridiculous machine gun on the hall table.
    I went outside.
    Grey sky that began fifty feet above my head. Drizzle. Therewas a cow munching at the roses in Mrs Bridewell’s garden. Another was taking a shit in Mrs Campbell’s yard.
    When I looked to the left and right I could see other cows